It’s time for an overhaul!

When I started this website up, I didn’t really know much about web design, well, to be fair I don’t know very much about it now either, although it’s certainly more than I did back then. As a result the site was pretty much thrown together, using a standard template and not really taking into consideration other aspects like the navigation or extra widgets which I would want to add in the future, however, the future is here and it’s time that proper web design was taken into consideration.

Now, the big consideration is if I should just use another template or not, the benefits are obvious, price, it’s that simple, although to make it look good I’m going to have to learn how to use it and spend a lot of time experimenting with colours, navigation and widgets, not to mention adding more content. The other option is to have one designed for me which just has the features I need, the obvious downside of this is the price, although that could be offset by some advertising or Google Adwords, it also means that if I want to change it slightly, I’ll need to get the designer to carry on working on it, so it’s a bit of a dilemma.

I’ve been looking at a few designers, and to be perfectly honest the big boys are right out of my league, someone like Tristar will undoubtedly do a good job, but the cost for them is just a no go, plus looking at the customer website examples, it looks like they tweak WordPress anyway. Then there is the option of companies like Jump Web Design, they do a free web design service, but you have to pay an ongoing maintenance, again it has it’s pro’s and con’s as I’d be committed to paying, but it does mean they would look after everything for me. The last option is someone like Syed who does cheap design and no ongoing fees, although no doubt I’ll want additional features which cost more, but that’s just me

So first things first, I need to decide on a colour scheme, I quite like the one on Jump Web, so may just use and adapt that a bit, I found a great tool from colour combos which automatically analyzes the colours used on any website and gives you the hexidecimal values, so that could make things quite easy. Then I need to decide on the sites theme, at the moment the content is a bit jumbled up with me just prattling on about whatever is on my mind at the time, it’s probably time to get a bit more focused, if you listen to the SEO guru’s they all say that content is king, if that’s the case I’m probably scraping being a Surf right now, so I recon that should be next. I’m kind of hoping that addressing the content will help me with the navigation and page layouts as certain things will be more suited to a particular niche.

Once all that’s done, I’ll need to start thinking about the SEO aspects of the site too, after all there’s no point in having it if nobody can find it on Google and Bing (other search engines may be available), I know a bit, like tweaking page titles and not keyword stuffing, but I suppose that will be the next big challenge!

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